British: Pre-1500

"For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or paraphrased in popular form."

This lengthy analysis of ballads of the late Middle Ages includes sections on "Definition of the Subject", "The Ballad Question", "Robin Hood", "The Epic Tendency", "Funeral ballads", and "Sources and Aesthetic Values of Ballads as a Whole."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Francis B. Gummere

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume II: English, The End of the Middle Ages

This lengthy analysis of English prose of the late Middle Ages includes sections on "Early English Prose", "Early Translations", "John Trevisa", "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville", "Mandeville’s Style", and "Mandeville’s Detail."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Alice D. Greenwood

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume II: English, The End of the Middle Ages

This lengthy analysis of Scottish literature of the late Middle Ages includes sections on "Early Fragments", "John Barbour; The Bruce", "Morte Arthure", "Lives of the Saints ", and "Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Peter Giles

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume II: English, The End of the Middle Ages

This lengthy analysis of early English tragedy includes sections on "Study, imitation and reproduction of Senecan tragedy", "Early English Tragicomedies", "Gismond of Salerne and its sources: motives of its authors", "The relations between Locrine and Selimus", and "the legacy of the Classics in Tragedy."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: John W. Cunliffe

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume V: English THE DRAMA TO 1642 Part One

This lengthy analysis of early English national poetry includes sections on "Early National Poems the work of Minstrels", "Beowulf: Scandinavian Traditions; Personality of the Hero; Origin and Antiquity of the Poem; the Religious Element", "The Wanderer " and "Religious Poetry of Heathen Times."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: H. Munro Chadwyck

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume I: English, From the Beginnings to the Cycle of Romance

This lengthy analysis of early English religious drama includes sections on "Concordia Regularis", "The vernacular in Medieval Drama", "Corpus Christi Plays", "Everyman", "Vicissitudes in the reigns of the Tudor sovereigns", and "The last of the Moralities."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: W. Creizenach

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume V: English THE DRAMA TO 1642 Part One

This lengthy analysis of 15th century English prose includes sections on "The Master of Game", "John Capgrave", "Reginald Pecock", "Sir John Fortescue", "Juliana of Norwich", "William Gregory’s Note-book" and "Copyists and Booksellers."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Alice D. Greenwood

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume II: English, The End of the Middle Ages

This lengthy analysis of several early Latin chroniclers includes sections on "England and Normandy ", "Characteristics of the Chroniclers", "Geoffrey of Monmouth ", "William of Newburgh", "Matthew Paris", and "Minor Chroniclers."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: W. Lewis Jones

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume I: English, From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance

This lengthy analysis of several early Latin writings in England includes sections on "Gildas and The History of the Britons", "Nennius and Historia Brittonum ", "Bede’s Ecclesiastical History ", and "Lives of Saints; Visions; Minor writings."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Montague Rhodes James

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume I: English, From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance

"The Middle Ages is a time of hypothesis wherein one of the most hypothetical concepts is time. The present essay addresses time as a conceptual and historical problem, in literary, religious, and practical terms. The interested student will find here valuable information on the origins of French literature, how the Middle Ages got its name, theological and everyday measurements of time, and the relationships of myth and fiction to genealogy in the founding of aristocratic families and feudal dynasties."

"The Medieval Feminist Index covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. ... In order to help researchers find current articles and essays quickly and easily, librarians and scholars began compiling the Medieval Feminist Index (MFI) in July 1996. ... MFI covers over 300 journals as well as many essay collections devoted in large part to topics dealing with women, sexuality, or gender. However, no year's worth of publications is completely indexed yet. ... There are over 3000 records in the database currently, and more than one hundred records are added every other month. ... The time period covered is 450 C.E. to 1500 C.E. with Russia extending to 1613, the beginning of the Romanov dynasty, because the sixteenth century is still medieval in social and politicial terms. The geographic area is Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East as well as areas in which Europeans travelled. Subject coverage for gender and sexuality means that articles on masculinity and male homosexuality are included. Publications in English, French, German, and Spanish are currently being indexed. Material in other languages, notably Italian, will be added in the near future. "

"My remarks today are prompted in great part by a reaction that has taken me by surprise recently in some undergraduate medieval classes. Certain before they begin that such characteristically modern issues as racism or questions of gender and power will be irrelevant to their study of medieval literature (and therefore that Chaucer, say, will certainly be "boring"), some students have begun to react not with interest but withdismay that they have to think about things like rape even in a medieval class. It's not so much that they feared that the class would be irrelevant to their concerns; they actively wanted it to be. This is not exactly what we have in mind, I take it, when we invoke "the alterity of the Middle Ages." Or is it?"

This lengthy analysis of several early metrical romances includes sections on "French Influences", "Benoit de Ste. More and Chr&eacute;tien de Troyes", "History of the English Romances ", "Breton Lays", "Sir Gawayne and Sir Tristrem", and "Relation of Romances to Ballads."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: W. P. Ker

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume I: English, From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance

"But what is striking about all of this work is its resistance to reaching back to medieval theater, in which crossdressing was also the standard practice, with male actors almost without exception playing all roles, both male and female. In contemporary Renaissance scholarship, the theater of the Middle Ages is at best the dimly perceived, rarely articulated, but necessary ground upon which the Renaissance theater and, by extension, the criticism on it, work their brilliant refigurings. Medievalists, too, have unwittingly collaborated in this oversight, downplaying the complexity of theatrical crossdressing as a cultural practice in medieval Europe. "

"The medieval period is one of the richest in our literary history. Within it we find, particularly in the lyrics, some of the most delightful, elegant, beautiful and bizarre poetry ever written in our language. There are expressions of joy and sorrow, ecstasy and triumph, both spiritual and carnal, distillations of love offered to God, the Virgin or an indifferentmistress, theological expositions, wild moments of bawdy fun, vicious assaults in the battles of the sexes, evocations of the impossibly beautiful, and any of them may be parodied to expressions of devotion or ridicule. No emotion can have been neglected by the medieval poets."

"This paper is a preliminary study into the nature of popular belief in the witch's familiar in early modern England and Scotland. It illustrates some of the similarities to be found between beliefs in the witch's familiar and contemporary fairy beliefs and argues that the extent of these similarities suggests that in the period there must have been considerable confusion between the two kinds of spirit, particularly on a popular level. The paper then goes on to argue that fairy beliefs provided a matrix of thought which underpinned the whole construct of the witch's familiar in the popular mind, a construct which interacted with elite demonological theory in a coherent and dynamic way."